I was always an athlete, not necessarily a good one. It's the thing to do from when you're little and your parents send you off to soccer, so that you have something to do, to get you out of their hair.

I was a swimmer for the longest time – my mom was a swimmer, she was a lifeguard and insisted that all of us learn how to swim from a safety standpoint, but I was the only one a amongst my siblings that really stuck with it.

My sister did track and field but I didn't really run at all until high school. I had an interest in joining the military and I realized that in order to pass the physical fitness test, I had to be able to run.

So I started running in my junior year. I joined track and I was pretty terrible at it. I was running the mile and the two mile and was very slow. It was a pretty steep learning curve for me, but the thing that got me hooked was that as opposed to swimming, running created a space where I could work on going further.

There wasn’t really a limit to what I could try to do – continuously engaging in this idea of how far I could go. So my coach actually got mad at me because in my senior year of track, I insisted on running a half-marathon with a teammate of mine and he was upset because he thought we were gonna injure ourselves and ruin our seasons.

I wanted to run a marathon, but there's mixed opinions about distance running when you're younger. A lot of people told me I should wait until after high school or college.

Ultimately, I did join the military and joined the Coast Guard and they were obviously very supportive of doing hard things. I ended up running my first marathon in my second year in the Coast Guard, but didn't stick with it for very long.

[As told to @Ragi Gupta — continued]